Nice find, never got around to looking back in the day. Its cool to see there was still some hidden stuff out there.

I note that the level locks up where your video ends for me, I assume the same for you? I expect this is due to missing resources (e.g. the restart markers).
Be nice to have free skate without it locking up for that bottom area since running out of time was always an issue with the psx beta once you got there without codes etc.

if it was a faq it was probably the original trick editing faq, otherwise it may have been the thps1 levels, vpn faq, park editor hack etc ... dunno there was a lot going on back then and it was long long ago

To play? nothing is gauranteed, but i run a Playonlinux instance with the windows client running to pull down data. From there i may gamble on wine, run a pol installer or run a new homebrew engine if available. I used to use a vbox install but wine is much more reliable when you get to running games.

Rolled the monsters as normal chars which made them low enough spec to match the PCs then i spec'd them up manually, one player went unconcious during the fight as they were concentrating on the statues instead of the dragon, once the dragon died though the satues returned to their natural state. Which ended the risk to the PCs

I roll my own rules for my kids, chars only have 4 stats rolled with d6, a class and a simple dungeon, we have mostly run deathmatch games until yesterday. Cover takes 1/2 dmg and rough terrain is 1/2 speed. We cross it over with warhammer and use those minatures/terrain to build a dungeon with some bits they collected from the garden added in. Movement is measured in inches. I also included adv/disadv rolls with traps/monsters/chests and a secret trap room in our run yesterday. Oh and I also Included a magic item that could only be touched by the wizard. I've been writing up my basic framework today actually. My kids named it Dungeon Hammer.

The adventure itself was start outside the dungeon with some information they had learned in town about orcs attacks coming from the dungeon, clear out the dungeon. They then decided where to go from there. They had dance parties and tried to turn to wee in the middle of the dungeon (but thats just kids being kids), just need to roll with it. The one who tried to become wee in the dungeon didn't have any magical ability to do so, so I said "You wet your pants and you movement is halved". No one tried that again. lol

Statues came to life from traps, they bypassed a secret room they found on the way out, they disturbed a sleeping Wyvern and then triggered a trap bringing 4 statues to life, one player ran into an adjoining room where they found an Orc riding a dragon which meant we had two battle fronts at once. The same player fleed once the Wyvern was destroyed to then have the dragon cast a spell which teleported the rest of the statues in the dungeon to the immediate area surrounding the player and brought them to life.

The statues were easy fodder just to give that immediate source of panic. Once defeated they re-entered the room to find a chest with an arcane lock and the same player who fleed previously ran to the exit. They stopped at one point and fired a fireball which was a low roll so the fireball cast badly off target but in doing so destroyed the door to the secret room by accident. As they tried to enter the room they found it was sheilded with a similar arcade energy to the chest. They worked their was through it (nat20) and found the secret room was actually a trap room of no purpose in the end where the walls closed in 1 state every PC turn. The goblin horde (PC) used their daggers to reset the trap on the secret room freeing the wizard.

In the chest one of the players found a bunch of gold and a wand which when touched froze their arm in place turning it black. For the one who picked it up (not a magic user) they couldn't drop the wand and on every turn the the frozen blackness grew across their body. I gave them the hint that maybe it need someone trained in the arcane arts to handle the wand and a chase(?) ensued. They met up and the wizard took possession of the wand. Then a few more bits and pieces of sillyness happened (kids, they have dance parties in dungeons and attack each other etc) then they finally returned to a roaring reception at the town. Then they counted their kills and asked when we were playing next.

Next run I'll introduce some more of the standard ruleset so we can work up to a fullscale character sheet but not bad for an adlib adventure. I should add my players are aged from 5 to 11

Minetest is a free Minecraft clone which is much faster than the original on older hardware. Otherwise I'd put some dosbox (gog.com) titles on there and emulators. Scratch is a programming tool for younger crew where they can build their own games as well. Gimp is a free image editing program where they can build the graphics for their own games. Some titles we run are Torchlight, 0ad, Dolphin emulator, Portal, Garry's Mod, Hammerwatch and also Libreoffice is popular, kids like to "make stuff". All my kids are all in that age range although we use Linux as an OS, I doubt win8 is going to give you the most bang for buck on that hardware.

OBS is where it's at these days I used to run glc/ssr and some others that escape me now but obs smashes them. Reliable video cap with a massive feature set in the scene builder. Quite happy these days.

NB if you want to cap wine games run with an emulated desktop to direct cap.

For me the THPS franchise broke at ~THPS3 as Neversoft had (around that time) signed a 10yr annual release deal which very quickly burnt out the core team from the first 3 games. The new engine in THPS3 was average at best, the feel was completely off.

Cauthen's Mother combo was the height of the THPS series combos for me (THPS1 in Warehouse, no manuals, no revert bs) and the series just became a combofest to try and emulate his genius.

My kids have all grown up with Linux. At one point when we were given some donor machines with windows pre-installed I gave my kid one for a week to play with. By Friday in the same week it had ~11 viruses and malware. He asked if he could replace it with Linux same day.

I stepped my son through setting up a dedicated minecraft server and am in the process of writing up some tutorials based on exactly that. Keeps them interested, they get a lot of exposure to basic tools and problem solving, it acts a prompt for you to explain things you may have forgotten and they get to use it afterwards. We setup a centOS VM together which he accesses via ssh to maintain. Very good project imo.

I had built effectively the same thing with my own script at home to generate a custom hosts. I throw mine out site wide as the addn-hosts file for DNSMasq sitting on a RPi. Ta, this has given me 2 more lists to add to it. Github